I’m reviewing the pericope of the Discourse with Nicodemus, a pericope contained only in John 3:1–21 and very likely interpolated with a commentary block after verse 15. In the narrative block, Nicodemus/Naqdimon approaches Jesus/Yeshua and the two share a dialogue about a new birth, a heavenly witness, and ascending into heaven. Last time I explored the dialogue about new birth. Here, I continue with the elements in the pericope about the heavenly witness.
When Nicodemus responds to Jesus’s teaching about the birth by breath by asking, “How can these things be?”, Jesus replies as though Nicodemus had asked incredulously and not inquisitively:
Are you the teacher of Yisra’el and you do not understand these things[?] Amen amen I say to you we speak what we know and we testify about what we have seen and you do not accept our testimony
If I tell you earthly things and you do not believe how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things[?]
As with so many of Jesus’s teachings, this dialogue invokes a rhetoric of antithesis, meaning, the rhetorical figure of putting contrasting ideas or metaphors into juxtaposition. The earthly and the heavenly aren’t only compared but contrasted: earth functions as the immediately observable, the apparent; heaven functions as the less observable, the less apparent or unapparent. Jesus presents the heavenly as more difficult to understand than the earthly and uses the antithesis figure of speech to suggest to Nicodemus that he can’t access the heavenly if he already rejects the earthly.
But Jesus doesn’t describe just anything earthly or heavenly; he speaks of witness in terms of the earthly and the heavenly. Nicodemus has countered Jesus’s points of rebirth and Jesus responds with a simple argument from witness: Jesus had seen the heavenly and used an earthly metaphor, wind, to explain it — and Nicodemus questioned the earthly metaphors. It’s as if Jesus now determines not to engage in the debate over the metaphors he used: Nicodemus certainly had observed the wind, so to question this earthly, apparent, accessible phenomenon distracts from the main point about being born from above, being born by breath, being born by God’s breath of life.
The pericope grounds Jesus’s teaching of heavenly things on a heavenly witness that proceeds from the earthly witness any regular person has. I said earlier how the pericope waxed esoteric by invoking symbols of wind and breath and rebirth; the pericope contains an admonition against descending too deeply into the esoteric meanings as Jesus replies to Nicodemus in physical, mundane terms. But the heavenly remains set apart from the earthly, a realm accessible but less so and dependent on at least accepting the witness, the evidence if you will, of the earthly realm.
This matters for the commentary block and John 3:16 — the excursus on the love of God and eternal life will be presented in wholly heavenly terms, and the 3rd-century commentator engaging in an apologia against Pagan critics of Jesus uses this pericope to position Jesus’s godly power within the category of heavenly witness. Just as Nicodemus couldn’t accept Jesus’s heavenly witness, so the commentator implies the non-Christian critic won’t accept the testimony of the love of God and eternal life revealed in Jesus.